SEO-akademiet.com - Online SEO course
This is how SEO-akademiet.com came in at number 1 on a highly competitive search.
If you want to place No. 1, it requires the right strategy
Getting a brand new page #1 on a competitive search
SEO-akademiet.com is a site owned by ourselves. It is a complete online SEO course, which is primarily aimed at small businesses that cannot afford help from an agency. In addition, it is also aimed at larger companies that want to handle SEO themselves.
Our desire was to be number 1 on “online SEO course”, since that is exactly what the site offers. Our idea here was that it would create great credibility with potential buyers of the course if you were number 1 on the search “online SEO course” – because if you are number 1 there, then you must have your SEO under control.
The only problem was that the search is of course relatively competitive, since people/companies that offer an online SEO course, funnily enough, are quite good at SEO and also want to be number 1 on this search.
However, the site is number 1 on the search today. We describe how we did this below.
The right strategy creates growth
The case in numbers
A holistic SEO approach created desired results faster than expected.
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The initial analysis
The initial analysis was actually relatively simple in this case. We wanted to be number 1 for “online SEO course”. The search is relatively competitive, as there are many experienced SEO people bidding. SEO-akademiet.com was a completely new site, which had no strength in this regard. Therefore, we would typically look at more low-hanging fruit rather than a competitive search such as “online SEO course”. However, this site only offers one thing, which is an online SEO course – which is why we obviously wanted to be number 1 for this search. From this, we created a strategy for how we could build the best content, build a stronger site through link building (so the site would be strong enough to rank) and do all SEO technically correct when the site was built and therefore rank in the search. We succeeded beyond all expectations and after only 2.5 months we were number 1 for the search. We haven’t done much SEO since then, just a little ongoing link building to continuously build the strength of the site (DR) and the site is still #1 over a year later (written 10/22/2023). How we did this is explained in more detail below.
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Content i denne case
When searching for “online SEO course”, it can be assumed that almost everyone who has created content for this has a handle on basic SEO, such as meta description, SEO title, alt tags, correct keyword density, internal links, outbound links, heading structure (H1 at the top, H2/H3 below), etc. Of course, we also had this completely under control in this case (as we do in all cases). However, it did not give us a ranking advantage, as the other pages on page 1 (and probably also pages 2, 3 and 4) probably also have these elements under control, as they themselves are experienced in SEO. We had to stand out by having the best and most helpful content (cf. Google’s algorithm) that lived up to 100% E-E-A-T (experience, expertise, authority, trust). We did an analysis of questions that were often asked about an online SEO course and made sure to implement good answers to these in our content. Including longtail keywords that were found to be interesting to rank for. We published this content on the front page, as it is (most often) the strongest page on a website. However, the best, in our opinion, content within online SEO courses was not enough, as you cannot rank with content alone. It requires a holistic approach, where you also have to work with link building and technical SEO.
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Linkbuilding
SEO-akademiet.com was a brand new site that we wanted to rank on a fairly competitive keyword. Of this, it was of great importance to build a stronger link building profile through external link building. This means links from other (relevant and strong) websites that linked to our site. Since we are an SEO agency ourselves, we have a large link building network, and in addition, we could also use a number of our own sites (just as we do for our clients). This resulted in the site going from a DR of 0 to a DR of 26. DR is an abbreviation for domain rating and can give an indication of a site’s strength, which is why it can be deduced that the site’s strength has definitely increased, which is also the reason why (together with content and technical SEO) the site is currently number 1 on the search “online SEO course”. The way to increase your DR is through backlinks. The inserted graph below shows the number of backlinks that we quickly built up. The graph clearly shows how the page was built from zero to 25+ backlinks of high quality and relevance. From there, we have built a smaller number here and there, since we had already come No. 1 on the desired search. We have done this to maintain the ranking. If you are reading pages and think “how many links are enough?”, then there is no concrete answer to this. It is more about quality than quantity. Therefore, relatively few backlinks were enough here, as they are of high quality/relevance (and content and technical SEO also play 100%). It should be mentioned that we would not normally build so many links in such a short time, as it might make sense to have a more natural flow in the number of backlinks. However, we were willing to “take a chance” with our own site, which turned out to work very well.
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Technical SEO
SEO-akademiet.com was a brand new site, so no “mistakes” had been made yet. As a result, there was not the same need to clean up the site’s URL structure, general structure, orphan pages, broken links, speed, etc. In this case, it was more important to take the right steps from the start. The homepage of the website is the only page that should rank, but we still built the rest of the site based on SEO technical aspects. As a result, the entire website is built with a simple and logical structure, which makes it easy for visitors to navigate around. The entire website is built responsively, so it works optimally on all devices. In addition, a cache plug-in has been installed, all images are uploaded compressed and it is generally thought out that the site should not be slow, as it has been built. A lot of design has been thought out on the front page, so that we could deliver the best landing page to present the content in a visually beautiful and simple way, compared to all the competitors within the search “online SEO course”.